britains most notorious hangmen

Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The Early History of Hanging 7

CChhaapptteerr 22 Jack Ketch 20

CChhaapptteerr 33 John Price 26

CChhaapptteerr 44 Richard Arnet 30

CChhaapptteerr 55 ‘Mutton’ Curry and Askern 33

CChhaapptteerr 66 Calcraft: Celebrity Executioner 44

CChhaapptteerr 77 Samuel Burrows 52

CChhaapptteerr 88 The Long-Drop Man 59

CChhaapptteerr 99 James Berry 71

CChhaapptteerr 1100 Bartholomew Binns 81

CChhaapptteerr 1111 Throttler Smith 91

CChhaapptteerr 1122 Billington Tales 97

CChhaapptteerr 1133 The Man from Rochdale 106

CChhaapptteerr 1144 Pierrepoints and the Last Hangmen 115

Steve Wade 136

Syd Dernley 147

Henry Allen 150

Harry Smith 153

CCoonncclluussiioonnss 155

AAcckknnoowwlleeddggeemmeennttss 160

BBiibblliiooggrraapphhyy 161

IInnddeexx 165

Britain’s Most Notorious Hangmen - P D F.qxd 12/01/2009 10:05 Page v

Introduction

Sir Thomas Browne, in his book,Lydford Journey (1644) wrote:

Oft have I heard of Lydford law,How in the morn they hang and drawAnd sit in judgement after.

rowne was writing because he had heard of a judge of theStannery at Lydford in Devon: a man who it was saidhanged a fellow at midday and then conducted the trial.British history teaches us many things about the moral and

legal codes which have created the spirit of the nation, and many ofthese formative habits and attitudes are anything but pleasant. Wehave always been a nation fond of exercising judicial killings. InFebruary 2008, the Sun would have us believe that little has changedin this respect; the newspaper reported that 99% of its readers wantedthe return of the hanging judge and the scaffold.

The feature reported that several famous people wanted the returnof hanging, including Anne Widdecombe and David Davis. But inter-estingly, Sara Payne ‘mum of murdered schoolgirl Sarah, nine, isagainst the death penalty..’ the paper stated. The tone of the entirefeature was one that has been repeated thousands of times in themedia, summed up by the words: ‘Almost 100,000 Sun readers unitetoday to call for the return of the death penalty.’

What is not so often discussed is the notion of exactly who wouldsupervise and carry out the hanging. The public hangman was thetarget of hatred, derision and violence through the centuries in whichBritain hanged its felons; he was also often made into a celebrity andwas of course the subject of morbid fascination. Hangmen feature justas prominently in the exhibits at Madame Tussaud’s Chamber ofHorrors as villains. Even as long ago as 1601, they have been vilified,even by the men they hanged (in spite of being given money to begthat the death be quick). The Earl of Essex, executed in that year bythe London hangman, Derrick, penned a ballad upon his life, and hewrote:

B

Britain’s Most Notorious Hangmen - P D F.qxd 12/01/2009 10:05 Page 1

Derrick! Thou knowest, at stately Calais I savedThy life, lost for a rape there done,Which thou thyself can testify –Thine own hand three and twenty hung . . .

The first hangmen were, on the manors and in the towns, paid byboth the civil and the religious power-bases, because courts prolifer-ated and several categories of people in high society had theprerogative of hanging culprits in their domain. They were usuallyrogues themselves, as was the case with a London hangman observedby a diarist called Machyn in 1556, who noted that ‘The 2nd day ofJuly was rode into a cart five unto Tyburn [the hanging site neartoday’s Marble Arch]. One was the hangman with the stump-leg – fortheft. The which he had hanged many a man and quartered many, andhad many a noble man and other . . .’

Of course, since capital punishment was abolished in Britain in1964, we have become acutely aware of the sick and revolting adverseviews of the act of hanging: notably the death of a person later provedinnocent of the capital offence. Such was the recent case of AlfredMoore, a Huddersfield man who was hanged in 1951 for the murderof two police officers. The Yorkshire Post for 1 January 2008announced:

A former detective has uncovered evidence that casts doubts on a man’sconviction for murdering two police officers more than fifty years ago . . .At his trial Moore, a poultry farmer with a lifestyle beyond his legalincome, admitted carrying out burglaries but said he was in bed at thetime of the shootings. The murder weapon was never found.

Detective Steven Lawson had investigated the case and foundstrong evidence that the real killer was a local man who died in 1998.

In 1961 Leslie Hale wrote a book called Hanged in Error in whichhe looked again at eleven cases of executions for murder and arguedthat they were almost certainly executions of innocent people. Halewrote:

Official complacency was given another jolt in 1953. In October, ayoung police officer on duty in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, was savagelyattacked by three men, and left gravely, and it seemed, mortally injured.The officer recovered. In January 1954, three men were brought to trial,found guilty, and sentenced to ten, seven and four years’ imprisonmentrespectively. Had the officer succumbed to the injuries, one or more ofthem would certainly have hanged. Doubts crept in. The prisongrapevine whispered the names of the real culprits, one of whom

Britain’s Most Notorious Hangmen2


confessed. The Home Secretary entrusted the enquiry to distinguishedofficers of Scotland Yard who, pursuing it with commendable determi-nation, established the innocence of the convicted men.

Of course, whether innocent or guilty, the fact is that large numbersof people have been hanged, either at the London Tyburn or in theprovinces, over the centuries, and their stories provide high drama,sensation and often darkly humorous entertainment. But the hang-man in those dramas of the scaffold is often a shadowy figure,simply mentioned in passing. The name Dick Turpin is very wellknown in popular culture and history, but how many people know hisexecutioner – Thomas Hadfield? He is prominent only if somethinggoes badly wrong. Many of the hangmen of England have had a drinkproblem or been severely depressed or even had notably unstablepersonalities; some took their own lives. On the other hand, somehangmen enjoyed their notoriety and took to the media or to travellingshows when their official careers were over.

The question of why felons were hanged is another that needs to beanswered. Albert Pierrepoint, who had hanged hundreds of people inhis long career, famously said: ‘I do not now believe that any one ofthe hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as adeterrent against future murder.’ Statistics indicate that hanging is nota deterrent, in the sense that the instances of murder do not decline instates in which there is capital punishment. Historically in England,the period with the most hangings, when the hangmen made goodmoney from the deceased clothes and payments for swift business atthe block or gibbet, was the Tudor era. Between 1536 and 1553,approximately 560 people were put to death at Tyburn.

There is also the odd fascination with the witnessing of hanging.George Orwell, in his essay A Hanging, written from his experience inthe police in Burma, made a point of writing about the strange blackhumour of officials when a hanging is part of their professional ex-perience. After the man has been hanged, Orwell writes, ‘Severalpeople laughed – at what nobody seemed certain . . . I found that I waslaughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superinten-dent grinned in a tolerant way. ‘You’d better all come and have adrink,’ he said quite genially, ‘I’ve got a bottle of whisky in the car. Wecould do with it.’

In many cases, the hangman was a criminal who had received areprieve for taking up the unpleasant duty of ‘turning off’ a fellowcriminal. His duties involved far more than simply taking care of thescaffold, ropes and drop; he was the man who administered the whip,cleared the streets of swine and generally acted as dogsbody when itcame to manorial or town business with regard to punishment. In

Introduction 3


Newcastle in the eighteenth century, he was known as the ‘whipperand hougher’ – he whipped wrong-doers and cut the sinews (houghs)of the swine. He also had to be either tolerant or well paid when itcame to indulging superstition and folklore around the corpse of thehanged man. In the Daily Gazetteer for 1748, we have this instance:

Last Wednesday Richard Biggs, for the murder of his wife, was executed. . . petitions were made to the sheriff to receive the stroking or the layingon of the dead man’s hands, with the agonizing sweats appearingthereon, in order to reduce the swelling; and after bearing his hands ontheir necks whilst he hung, they seemed so well satisfied with the appre-hension of a cure . . .

The great children’s author, Hans Andersen, was taken by hisparents to see an executioner, and made to drink the warm blood ofthe dead killer, such was the belief in the efficacy of such things.

The question arises: how did the hangman learn his craft? Until themid-Victorian period, there was certainly no apprenticeship ortraining given. Hanging a condemned felon was the responsibility ofthe county sheriff and if he could not find a hangman, then he wouldhave to do the job himself. Not until the 1880s was there any properproposal made for the training of the public executioner. Yet in theearly days, the men who did this dirty work managed most of the time,though they often had to pull the legs of the victims, or strangle himor her as quickly as possible if the rope failed or slipped.

Clearly, trades involving butchering would provide some of theessential skills of the craft. The first known hangman in London wasa man called Cratwell, active in the years from 1534 to 1538; he wassaid to be ‘a cunning butcher in the quartering of men’. To make thetask more of a challenge, the Tyburn gallows (copied at York on theKnavesmire) was known as the three-legged mare, and was a trian-gular affair made to make the hanging of several victims possible at thesame time. On one occasion, twenty-four felons were hanged on this,eight on each spar; none of the bodies touched any other.

Hangings were a massively popular public event through thecenturies, until 1868 when public executions were abolished.Thousands usually lined the route to Tyburn, and the swelling crowdat the death scene was often raucous, unruly and callous. In thefamous case of Courvoisier, who had murdered Lord William Russellin 1840, there was a crowd of 40,000 people waiting to see thevillainous butler die. One of these was Charles Dickens, who describedthe scene and he reflected on the nature of the hangman: ‘I came awaythat morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder Isaw done . . . I can see Mr Ketch at this moment, with an easy air,



taking the rope from his pocket; that I feel myself shamed anddegraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that spot . . .’Dickens used ‘Mr Ketch’ as that had become the generic name for thehangman by that time.

The public hangman’s role and duties were eventually takenseriously by William Marwood, the Lincolnshire man who introducedthe practice of the ‘long drop’. Marwood practised with sacks inorder to ascertain the right drop for a specific weight, such that afelon would die by asphyxia rather than strangulation. In many cases,in the earlier centuries of hanging, the knot was made arbitrarily, notby the requisite bone and artery for a quicker death. ThoughMarwood did have some memorable bunglings, these were not socommon as errors made by his antecedents and indeed by some ofhis contemporaries.

Today, from a viewpoint over forty years after the end of hangingin Britain, it is easy to find accounts of the business of hanging: theprocedure and the ritual, yet there is very little on the nature ofthe business on the staff involved. But in the official reports andenquiries it is possible to find sensitive and thoughtful writing on thetopic. For instance, in the report of the committee looking into execu-tion in 1953, we have these words on the hangman:

At present, any person may apply to the Prison Commissioners tobecome an executioner . . . But we recommend that sheriffs should varytheir selection of executioner so as to ensure that there are always twoexperienced executioners on the list . . .

This was important. In Ireland, for instance, the prison authoritieshad been unable to find a hangman for most of the penal history ofthe main prisons. In England, there had been plenty of instancesthroughout the 1920s and 1930s when the assistant only hadofficiated. In fact, in the last years of Victoria’s reign, an inexperiencedhangman was allowed to take on an execution at Lincoln prison,simply because he turned up for the job (in place of the expected man)and the work had to be carried out.

The public hangman is firmly entrenched in the popular culture ofBritish history, and he has been the subject of novels, films and poems.His work has entered street ballads, and the entire subject of hanginghas been written about by dozens of famous writers, from Oscar Wildeto Alfred Tennyson. But still, there is the man himself, with his ropesand drop calculations, at the end of the newspaper report. He is notcentre-stage. This book aims to bring the biographies out of obscurityand tell the tales of the hangmen from the late seventeenth century tothe end of capital punishment in 1964, when the whole sorry record

Introduction 5


of killings ended with a day of two executions, one in Manchester andone in Liverpool.

My thanks go especially to the writers on hangmen who haveopened up the best sources to writers such as myself: James Bland,Steve Fielding, David Bentley, Geoffrey Abbot and John Eddleston inparticular. Digging for the stories of the hangmen involves spendingtime looking at obscure memoirs, snippets in old newspapers, andsometimes looking through the ephemera of early true crime. Thanksto the above writers, that task is not quite so daunting as it once was.



CHAPTER 3

John Price

ohn Price was born in London somewhere around the year1677, and was at first made an apprentice to a scraps andrags trader. After two years, when his master died, Price didnot exactly hang around waiting for developments: he ran

away and took up with any trade or general labouring he could. TheNewgate Calendar author states that ‘His mother being left in circum-stances of distress, was not able to give him a proper education . . .’

We know that he went to sea as well, putting in service on battle-ships (men-of-war) and there was plenty of war to be involved in atthe time, with the Low Countries mainly. When he came back on landto find a way to start again, it was as the hangman that he found hismetier, although the record he left is hardly a proud one.

Price was always in trouble, stepping over the line into lawlessness.But he was also feckless and constantly in debt. This was such aproblem that on one occasion, after officiating at an execution of threefelons at Tyburn tree in 1715 (the first main Jacobite rising), he wasarrested for debt. It is entirely in keeping with the life of the typicalGeorgian hangman that he just scraped himself out of a long sentence,largely because he had the perquisites of the job: what he earned fromsales and tips that day paid his debts. If desperate, a hangman couldalways sell the clothes of the dead, for example, in addition to sellingthe rope and having the expected sum to make the ‘turning off’ swift.

But there were more debts and these dogged him until he was even-tually imprisoned in the Marshalsea, in Southwark, described later byCharles Dickens as ‘Partitioned into squalid houses standing back toback and hemmed in by high walls duly spiked at the top.’ We canhave some idea of how grim that place was when we note that one ofthe warders, a man called Acton, was tried for murder in 1729. ButPrice had two spells in the limelight of criminal history – first ashangman and then as the hanged man, and his time in the Marshalseadefines the first period. Ketch followed him at that point.

John Price rivals that most infamous of eighteenth century villainsin the list of his adventures, Jack Shepherd. This is because he andanother rogue escaped from the place; they managed to make a holein the wall and run for it, after several months inside. But there was adangerous streak in Price; not long after that he killed a man, in 1718,and then he attacked a woman in Bunhill Fields. This was a very brutalkilling. In the Newgate Calendar, the account is explicit and savage:

J


In the course of the evidence it appeared that Price met the deceased[Elizabeth White] near ten at night in Moorfields, and attempted toravish her, but the poor woman, who was the wife of a watchman, andsold gingerbread in the streets, doing all in her power to resist hisvillainous attacks, he beat her so cruelly that streams of blood issued fromher eyes and mouth, broke one of her arms, beat out some of her teeth,bruised her head in a most dreadful manner, forced one of her eyes fromthe socket and so otherwise ill-treated her that the language of decencycannot describe it . . .

Price was tried and sentenced to death. He denied the crime, butthere were two eyewitnesses. These people had seen him in flagrantedelicto, one saying that Price was ‘busy about her’ and that the poorwoman’s clothes had been pulled up to expose her flesh. Price hadresponded to the witnesses’ intervention with drunken curses and thewords, ‘Damn you . . . what do you want?’ He had told the people thenthat the woman was nothing but a drunk. Of course, in court, Pricesaid the usual defensive statement: that he had merely been passing bywhen he saw Mrs White lying in that awful state. He even claimed thathe had helped her to stand and then been found and suspected of theattack. The poor woman suffered a long, painful death, taking fourdays to die.

John Price was condemned to die. The story circulated in the

John Price 27

The three-legged mare, York Tyburn. Chris Wade


Weekly Journal newspaper was that Price was not worried at all by thethought of the noose, and that he went to see the present hangman,took him by the hand and said, ‘He had hanged a great many and nowhe must hang him . . .’ The scene took place in Newgate. He was inthat gaol for five weeks, in the condemned cell, a place where curiousvisitors could come, for a small fee, and stare at those awaiting deathon the scaffold. The cell would have been dark, extending for aroundtwenty feet by fourteen, and Price would have been constantlyshackled in irons.

The Weekly Journal reported: ‘He hath since sentence . . . beendrunk several days excessively and committed horrid outrages.’ Theseappear to have been sexual depravity, and one report states that heraped a little girl who brought him food: ‘.. the hangman in Newgate


Petty Treasonillustrated, a burning ofa woman. Malefactor’sRegister, 1800


has declared that a few days before his execution he had carnal knowl-edge of her . . .’

He was hanged on 31 May 1718 but at the Newgate gallows: therewas no long, ritualistic procession to Tyburn for him. Before the noosewas in position, he begged the gathered crowd to pray for him andthey hoped that ‘they would take warning by his untimely end’ andafter the hanging he was gibbeted at Holloway. We have an interestingfootnote to this, and it tells us a lot about hangmen as a general profes-sion: the hangman who preceded Price was called Marvell, ablacksmith, and he made the iron cover for the corpse on the gibbet.In keeping with the tendency of hangmen to be ‘multi-skilled’ as wesay now, Marvell in retirement still played a part by using another skill.

John Price was just forty-one when he died. Historian James Blandhas pointed out a mysterious note on the man’s life and story – that aline in the Weekly Journal of 28 May, 1720 notes that ‘In the sameprison died one Price, widow of the late hangman who, had she lived,would have been transported.’ That is all that we know of her story.Much of the life of John Price is clouded in legend and half-truth. Thefacts we know for sure are few. Publications at the time confused hisname and story with that of Ketch himself, such was the confusionabout the number of executioners working in the last few decades ofthe seventeenth century.

The Newgate Calendar tells his story and ends with a moral asser-tion: ‘The lesson to be learnt from the fate of this man is to moderateour passions of every kind . . .’ Price never learned that lesson, and heslid from drunkenness to the lowest depravity, a notorious hangmanwith a shameful biography, though very much a man of his time inthat horrendous criminal underworld of Georgian England.

John Price 29


britains most notorious hangmen

Documents

hanging judge

notorious hangmen p

hangmen feature justas

death penalty

lydford law

lydford journey

harry smith

throttler smith